Rosalind stopped, and Doom swam into her fins. A black wall surged, plunged, rose and plunged again an arm’s length from their faces, a hundred tons of bucking steel. How could they attach a thing to the bottom of that without getting themselves crushed? Doom was sucking air like a diesel engine, but he had the presence of mind to check his pressure gauge. It showed fewer than a thousand pounds remaining. Rosalind dropped another fifteen feet and swam beneath the keel. Doom followed, telling himself to think about the task at hand, not about the reality of the pitching and plunging keel of a hundred-and-twenty-foot-long ship above their heads.
Rosalind shone her big light on the bottom of the hull. It was red, not black, encrusted with barnacles and green, mossy growth like fringe on a plate-steel cocktail dress. The entire hull climbed slowly up ten feet as each wave cleared the bow, but it came back down three times faster in a killing dive before the frightful process repeated itself. Doom switched on his own light and shone it on the same spot while Rosalind unstrapped the bomb from his belt and cut it out of the net bag, which she cast adrift. Then she unclipped the tether from her own belt. She’d need complete freedom of movement for what she was about to do. She lay in the water, neutrally buoyant, watching the bounding steel plate, timing her attempt.
She waited until the hull dove down to its deepest point. Then it began its upward surge. Rosalind ascended three feet and waited for it to come back to her. And it did. She stuck the bomb in place, then deftly bolted toward the sea bottom. The ship bucked the next wave, and when it dropped again, the bomb broke free, began to sink.
Doom caught it in his light but immediately lost it. He dove, no time to equalize the stabbing pressure in his ears. Finning hard, thighs tightening, knotting, he waved his light at black nothing. His light seemed absurd in its puniness. The bomb was gone. Doom slid into sea-dark despair.
Something hard hit his fins, and panic squeezed out despair. A Gulf Stream of adrenaline pumped. Once the shark tore off his legs at the crotch, perhaps death would be mercifully swift, and he’d be spared the actual perception of the teeth that tore his person to bloody tatters. But his blood would alert others, and finding Doom slim pickings by then, they’d head for Rosalind. But it wasn’t a shark that had struck his fins—it was the bomb.
Upside down he caught it against his belly, and suddenly he was exhausted, nothing left, not even a firm idea of which way was up. “This is the stuff of panic right here, boy. You know what follows panic, don’t you, boy?” said that part of his consciousness that remained separate, critical. “You better get hold of yourself, because this is how fools like you die!” But that part didn’t have any idea which way was up either. Thinking ponderously through the mucus of panic, Doom hit upon an idea. He’d blow some air into his buoyancy compensator—it could only lead him up. Physics.
The trip up seemed to take two days, after which the pounding steel hull—and Rosalind’s “okay” light—hove into view…What was she doing? And what was that noise? It sounded steely, a scraping sound. He shone his big light on Rosalind. Christ, look at her!
She chased the hull upward, then when it began its plunge, she braced her feet flat, crouched upside down, and, as if straddling it, rode the King Don toward the bottom. But why? Another in the welter of emotions he’d undergone in the last five minutes washed over him—admiration and love for Rosalind—when he realized what she was doing. The magnet hadn’t gotten a good grip because of the marine growth on the bottom. Rosalind was scraping it off with a big knife!
Doom hovered, holding the light for her. She rode the ship twice more before she took the bomb from Doom’s arms and stuck it in place. Doom and Rosalind swam aside and watched several bucks and plunges while the bomb stuck as securely as a mussel colony. Then Rosalind sighted across her compass and pointed due west. She hooked the tether back onto Doom’s belt before, side by side, they swam toward the pickup point. Doom took Rosalind’s hand and squeezed it, not too hard, he hoped. Escape death only to have her digits crushed by an overstimulated lover.
They swam underwater for several hundred yards before Doom felt breathing resistance. A calm, a sense of well-being just short of euphoria had set in, and Doom felt he could go on like this forever, alone with Rosalind, swimming through three-dimensional darkness—except for the fact that Doom was running out of air. Was Rosalind? he wondered. Probably not, what with her professionally disciplined air consumption. Gently Doom pulled on the tether, and Rosalind stopped swimming. Doom held his pressure gauge before her mask. The luminous dial said Doom was down to two hundred pounds per square inch. Rosalind pointed at the surface and headed there.
Fifteen feet down, they felt the tug and toss of the seas, but that was lullaby rocking compared to the chaos at the surface. Waves broke everywhere in white swirls. In their troughs the night seemed still, but on the crests wind whined maliciously. Here in shallower water, thirty feet deep, there was none of the predictable rolling Doom and Rosalind had experienced beneath the King Don. Here there was no order to the steep seas. Waves butted and tripped over each other, crashed together at oblique angles, a horde without sense or mercy. Spume flew in snaking ridges across the sea. Visibility from the decks of Staggerlee would have been strained; from the surface it was nearly nil.
This was the part of her plan—the pickup—that she feared most. She had never tried anything like this—ship killing on nasty nights didn’t often come up in sport diving sessions. She kicked hard, trying to propel herself far enough out of the water to see. Doom imitated her.
Rosalind gasped into her mouthpiece when finally she found the lights of the King Don. It was far to the south. These inshore currents were another source of fear. They were unpredictable in force and direction, “set” and “drift” in marine parlance. That night a strong eddy had set them over a mile to the north, even though Rosalind had aimed due west. Bert would be searching for them well south of their actual position, unless he noticed the current and put two and two together, but by then it might be too late. She popped out of a crest waist-high and waved her big light at the southern darkness, but no light answered her. She dropped her weight belt and wriggled out of her backpack harness. A wave swept the tank from her grasp and carried it shoreward before it sank. Doom did the same.
She shouted instructions at him: They’d have to swim for shore. Doom was afraid of that. She told him to fully inflate his flotation vest, leave his mask on, swim on his back, easily, conserving energy, letting the wind and sea help them home, never mind the waves breaking over his head. How far was home? They could see shoreside lights, what, a mile and a half away? Add to that the current’s northerly set, and call it two miles even.
“Don’t worry, Doom, we’ll make it. It won’t be comfortable, but we won’t sink.” What if he did? What if her sloppy plans got Doom killed, later to wash up, bloated like his father, on Omnium Beach? No, she would get him in no matter what.
Would the King Don go up while they were still in the water? Would they feel the concussion? Doom wished they could talk, discuss what they had shared, but conditions prohibited chitchat. Sometimes waves would heave and break directly under their legs, pitch-poling them, fins in the air, and the swimmers would come up entangled in their tether and each other. They swam in the chaos for nearly two hours. Then Doom recoiled at the feel of something hard beneath his fins.
“Rocks!” shouted Rosalind, and to keep her draft as shallow as possible, she began to body-surf. Doom followed. The last wave buried him, pulled and yanked at his arms and legs, bounced him off the sandy bottom inshore of the rocks and left him in a heap on the beach. He crawled away from the sea…
Rosalind! Where was Rosalind! She was on her knees nearby, framed against the relatively bright western sky. Doom crawled to her and hugged her. They were safe on Omnium Beach, not fifty feet from where his father had washed up. Doom let out a yelp of joy, and Rosalind was giggling. Then, knees drawn up, they sat like tourists watching the sea on a sunny afternoon.
“Mine too.”
“Then perhaps we ought to remove them.”
“Not now,” grinned Rosalind. “Later.”
“Where do you think Bert is?”
“God knows. What time is it?”
Doom looked at his watch. “Oh. It’s about that time.”
“Let’s watch the lights go out.”
And there they sat waiting for the King Don to go down. Doom held Rosalind’s hand…The time came. And went. Neither spoke. Doom looked at his watch again. They waited.
Nothing.
Rosalind flopped back in the sand. “It must have fallen off. It’s my fault.”
“Naw, it’s my fault. It was a crazy idea in the first place. We should have just lured him ashore and ambushed him. Or something.”
“It’s all my fault,” said Captain Bert to Longnecker, disregarding the fact that Longnecker had lost the capacity to respond. He had curled into a ball against the base of the control pedestal. Occasionally he whimpered. Doom and Rosalind were gone, swept away, just like the poor tourists aboard the Amberjack. Bert would never forget the feel of the bow plunging into the trough, the stern tripping over the bow, all control lost. He could do nothing but hang on as the sixty-foot boat was heaved onto the jetty, smashing her starboard bilge, sinking in minutes. He’d never forget the disdainful looks on the faces of the investigating officers as they administered the drug and alcohol tests, but Bert hadn’t been drinking. He had simply made a mistake, and six people drowned. He’d never forget the emptiness in his heart and the confusion in his head, the same emptiness he felt now as he searched the black surface of the violent sea, without hope. He urged himself to think, think like a seaman…
Captain Bert pulled the throttle lever back to neutral. His line of position placed him on a range between the lights of the King Don and the lights of the Broadnax mansion. By stopping, drifting, he’d gain some reference to the set and drift of the current, but visually he would have to separate drift from leeway, particularly hard to do at night in an unfamiliar boat. It would take a born seaman’s instinct. Dead in the water, Rosalind’s boat pitched and rolled wildly. Longnecker moaned. Bert waited, pinching out the panic with maritime logic.
Yes, he was being set well north of his range marks. Like a corpse, Longnecker rolled from port to starboard and back again. Bert shoved the boat into gear and pointed the bow at zero degrees. He plugged in Rosalind’s handheld searchlight and waved it around his course, but there was nothing to see, only rampant whitecaps.
Back on the beach, tingling excitement had turned to barren disappointment. The sand chafed inside their suits. Rosalind had flopped on her back, staring at the sky. Doom sat clutching his shins, still hoping to see the King Don’s lights shake, then sink, but it didn’t happen. Nothing happened. The lights twinkled on.
“Damn it!” said Rosalind, sitting up.
“What?”
“Tar! I laid in a glop of tar! Feel it—it’s in my hair! Fucking oil companies! Look—” She pointed seaward.
A light beam poked at the sea.
“It’s Bert.” She switched on her own light, blinked it on and off.
Bert saw it and whooped with delight. “Longnecker! I found them, Longnecker! They’re on the beach!”
Longnecker was glad to hear that, but the only sign he could manage was an ill-formed “okay” gesture.
Fifteen minutes later Bert was circling slowly off the beach. He couldn’t go in any farther or the breakers would drop him on the rocks.
“He can’t come in any closer,” said Rosalind. “We’re going to have to swim for it.”
“Swim?”
“Yeah, it does sound like a drag, all right. Would you rather walk?”
“Yes.”
“We could have him pick us up at the Flamingo Tongue. We should have planned it that way in the first place. Shit. It’s all my fault.”
“No, it’s my fault.”
It took a while, shouting back and forth in the wind, but finally Rosalind got her message across the breakers. Bert motored off toward Bird Cut, which would be a nasty place, especially if the tide had turned. Lugging their remaining gear, Doom and Rosalind trudged up the beach toward the Flamingo Tongue.
On the way Doom said, “Rosalind, I hope you don’t feel guilty about shooting that guy Walter. We didn’t get to discuss that yet.”
“Guilty? I don’t feel guilty. He killed your father. He was a scumbag.”
“Okay. Just checking.”
“You know, I love you.”
“You do?”
“Yeah.”
Longnecker crawled out of the boat and flopped facedown on the dock. The restaurant was closed for the night, the docks dark. They couldn’t see the pain and shame on his face as Longnecker said, “I’m sorry, sorry, sorry. It was my fault.”
But Doom had another idea, a crazy idea, not as crazy as trying to bomb the King Don at sea, but still crazy.
READY ABOUT
Donald Sikes paced the fantail. He hadn’t slept since the night it had allegedly happened. When was that precisely? Night before last? Why hadn’t he heard from Mr. Freed? And now the wind was blowing so hard, Donny was getting seasick. Perhaps it was all those piñas. And what’s more, Gramps was beginning to notice his anxious drinking…Maybe Mr. Freed had gypped him. He’d already paid for the murders. Maybe Mr. Freed absconded. But that didn’t sound like Mr. Freed; he had an impeccable reputation for honesty. Donny Sikes decided to have a shower and go to bed. His breath stank of tropical fruits.
The telephone rang.
“Mr. Sikes, please,” said a gravelly voice on the other end.
“Who are you? Where’d you get this number?”
“You can call me Mr. DeSoto. I’m an associate—a kind of agent—of the man you hired to perform a certain task on the evening before last. Do you follow me?”
“…Yes.” Even professional killers had agents?
“I’ve been asked by that man to tell you the job is complete. The old man, the scuba diving woman, and the old man’s son. Do you follow me?”
“The old man’s son too?”
“Yes, and that is the problem. You neglected to tell my client that the son would be coming as well. So the original plan will not work. My client has, therefore, disposed of the, uh—need I spell it out for you, Mr. Sikes?”
Yes! Donny would have loved to have had it spelled out for him. What had happened in that house? “Uh, Mr. DeSoto?”
“Yes?”
“Let me ask you this. Will we read about them in the newspapers?”
“Let me put it to you like this, Mr. Sikes. We might read about their absence, but not their discovery. Do you follow me?”
“Yes…what about the other matter?”
“What other matter is that?” asked Mr. DeSoto.
“Uh, the other gentleman?”
“Mr. Loomis?”
“Yes.”
“He just left. Do you follow me?”
“Tonight?”
“Tonight.”
“Will he be coming back?”
“No. There will be a nominal additional charge for the son and the inconvenience his presence caused my client, and I’ll be in touch with you about that. On behalf of Mr. Freed, it was a pleasure doing business with you. Good-bye, Mr. Sikes.”
“Wait just one minute there, Mr. DeSoto. How come you’re calling me Sikes? That isn’t how Mr. Freed knew me. He knew me as Mr. Shipton.” Donny smelled a rat.
“It’s in Mr. Freed’s interests to know the true identity of his clients. For security reasons. Learning his clients’ true identity is one of the services I perform for him. Do I need to spell it out for you, Mr. Sikes?”
“No, but I’ll bet you I don’t know his true identity.”
“I wouldn’t take that bet, Mr. Sikes.”
Donald Sikes smiled, then giggled, his seasickness forgotten. He went below to tell Gramps that t
he way was clear for construction to proceed apace.
Mr. DeSoto’s gravelly voice hurt Doom’s throat.
THE DELEGATION
Early next morning Rosalind’s boat approached the King Don through sloppy swells. The wind had dropped to below ten knots and veered to the southeast, but it would take all day and most of the night for the sea to settle.
Professor Goode, wearing a new suit, gripped the steering pedestal with white knuckles. “I’m going to upchuck,” he said.
“Concentrate on the horizon,” offered Captain Bert, who wore a freshly starched khaki captain’s uniform. A little rectangle of darker cloth remained over the left breast pocket from where Bert had removed the name patch of his last command: the Amberjack.
Sheriff Plotner in his best dress uniform with the Mountie hat wasn’t feeling so chipper himself. Breakfast bacon grease was creeping up the back of his gullet.
The Annes, filming, felt all right, delighted to be in the thick of things.
“Think about something else,” Bert suggested. “Think about the rodeo.”
The rodeo? Professor Goode was frightened that he’d be unable to speak and thereby ruin everything. He considered calf roping, bronc busting. “I—I can’t…talk!”
“Hmm,” mused Bert. “How ’bout you, Plotner? Can you talk?”
“Gak,” said the sheriff.
“Maybe you’ll feel better when we get aboard. The motion on that thing’ll be a lot different, won’t be this bouncing slap-slap. It’ll be more like uuuuup then dowwwwn—so you might feel better.”
Professor Goode threw up over the starboard bow, Sheriff Plotner the port.
“You guys always want to throw up downwind. Listen. I’ll give them a jingle.” Bert snapped up the VHF transmitter. “This is whiskey, able, bravo, two-niner approaching the King Don from the west-northwest.” That was a lot of unnecessary bullshit under the circumstances, but Jesus, the words felt good in his mouth. “Come in, King Don, over.”
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